Beyond the Event Horizon

by Albert Sartison

  He lay his head on the rather coarse but comfortable pillow and closed his eyes. A picture floated into his head of himself and Maggie returning from a short walk in the park just as the news that the alien ship had been fired upon reached the base and a state of emergency was declared.

  To Steve’s surprise, there had been no panic among the scientists. No-one had run around the situation room with a mad look in their eyes crying blue murder. Most of the scientists had just taken the information on board with a laconic shrug of the shoulders. Over the several weeks they had been involved in the project, they had developed an immunity to exciting news, no doubt learning this from the military.

  On the same day, after receiving the first detailed information from the blockade group commander, General Rohas, the Space Force High Command made contact with the Academic Council from their secret bunkers. It appeared that the situation, which had been gradually heating up in the past few days and was beginning to come to the boil, had resolved itself of its own accord. The alien ship had simply gone back home without a word.

  The Academic Council was kept together for a few more days in case the incomer suddenly made itself known. A few days later however, when nothing had happened, the ‘Dawn’ project was put on hold. By an absolute majority of government representatives from every country on Earth, it was decided not to remove its secrecy rating.

  The military removed their stationary weapons from Jupiter’s satellites and dispersed the groups of ships they had formed all over the Solar System, leaving only a few craft equipped with scientific apparatus to study the consequences of the strike against the incomer. The consequences of the explosion to Jupiter’s atmosphere, which were too noticeable to be hushed up, were explained to the public as a test of stationary weapons for use against super-large asteroids.

  After that, the space forces embarked on the greatest inquiry ever undertaken. As well they might. It had been the first armed conflict with an alien civilisation in history. Everything was subjected to exhaustive study and critical analysis, including the principle of subordination and interaction of all the offensive and defensive forces in the space fleet.

  Naturally, special attention was devoted to explaining the behaviour of the fixed weapon that had made the unauthorised strike against the incomer – the gun with the military codename E1. E1 had been totally destroyed by a series of powerful explosions and scarcely anything bigger than a micron was left of it. Furthermore, most of the material of which it had consisted, mixed with surface ice and water from Europa’s ice-covered ocean, had either been scattered all over the Solar System or had fallen on Jupiter. This made things much harder for the military specialists trying to find out the reason for the unauthorised strike.

  All the logs of the weapon’s technical parameters and of the communications between its gun crew, the command group and other ships were taken and subjected to intensive analysis. After finishing the investigation and putting together a picture of what had happened from minute fragments, the military did somehow manage to dig up one or two things.

  As we know, the space intruder had been told in the form of an ultimatum to take the dialogue to the political level. When it continued to evade specific answers, the group of military negotiators demanded that it leave the Solar System and withdraw beyond the heliosphere. The incomer had asked for 30 hours to consider this demand, on the grounds that it was obliged to have its actions approved by its superior command structures. With only a few hours left before the ultimatum expired, E1 had somehow become cocked and ready to fire.

  The system of subordination within the strike group was such that the command was unable to take complete control of the weapon remotely. The command could only take a weapon off safety and issue a command to the gun crew on site, but firing a shot or preventing one could only be done through physical access to the weapons.

  Without any information on the capabilities of the alien civilisation, the military did not want to risk activating remote access to their weapons. After all, the incomer might break through the protective perimeter and seize control of the space fleet. It was this shortcoming in the system that played a dirty trick on the fleet command. When E1 stopped subordinating itself to Rohas, he had no other way of putting it out of action except by destroying it.

  General Rohas had unsuccessfully tried to make contact with the gun crew. At that precise moment, the alien ship was outside E1’s zone of visibility. Rohas then ordered the ships of the second echelon, attack ships intended to prevent strike weapons from this very sort of independent activity, to fire a warning shot.

  There had been no reaction. Unfortunately, it would never be possible to find out whether the gun crew had lost its nerve at that moment, or if sabotage had taken place, or if they had gone out of their minds or were even dead. Since the incomer was quickly entering E1’s strike zone, the decision was taken to neutralise the combat-ready gun together with its crew.

  The second echelon command ship fired, but missed. It tried again and again, each time without success. It then fired a volley from every weapon under its command. Ten powerful ships let loose a storm of fire on Europa to compensate for any excessive targeting error.

  As a result of the explosion, the satellite lost about one per cent of its mass. A huge quantity of ice, dust and rock was ejected into space, the temperature of Europa’s ocean rose by several degrees over an area of several thousand square kilometres, and the celestial body changed its angle of rotation around its own axis and its orbit around Jupiter.

  Nevertheless, E1 had had time to fire at the alien ship. The delay due to the targeting error of the second echelon command ship turned out to be enough for the shot to be fired.

  The incomer, caught at a tangent by the explosion, had been ejected from its former orbit, after which it rapidly accelerated and disappeared into the depths of space.

  The command was concerned with three questions, on which the investigation concentrated. Why had the random cocking of the weapon taken place? What had happened to the crew, since there had been no reaction either to attempts to contact it or to the warning shots? And why had the attack ships of the second echelon not been able to put E1 out of action with the first shot?

  When it is a matter of military operations on Earth, there always remains the possibility of concealed agents, ‘sleepers’, who can undertake a sabotage operation on the enemy’s instructions. But the idea that Earthlings could be recruited by the aliens seemed absurd, and was not considered credible.

  They did not succeed in finding a sensible explanation for the behaviour of the crew of E1 in the minutes before it fired. There was constant monitoring of the atmosphere in their living accommodation, so poisoning by some kind of gas, or loss of seal, could be discounted. The motion sensors did not register any foreign objects. No non-standard activity was recorded. The behaviour of E1’s gun crew directly before it was destroyed remained a mystery. The only thing that was known for certain was that the order to take the weapon off safety must have been given from within. E1 did not receive any order remotely.

  There is rarely one single reason for a catastrophe of technical origin. More often than not, a whole chain of circumstances lies behind it, and what happened to E1 was no exception.

  The situation in which E1 escaped from the command’s control had been considered possible, so in this case, the strike group blockading the alien ship had included the second-echelon ships. The second echelon had the specific task of destroying weapons not responding to orders, as a last resort. Unfortunately, however, even these safety measures had proved insufficient.

  When it became clear that control over E1 had been lost and it would be impossible to restore it within an acceptable time, a shot was fired at it by one of the second-echelon ships. The anti-matter charge missed the target and struck the surface of Europa hundreds of metres from the targeted point. Since the charge had been fired from a distance of only a few tens of thousands of kilometres, a distance from which
a miss was not expected, its energy had not had an excess reserve. But it would have been enough to put E1 out of action and possibly to save the lives of its crew.

  As was discovered later, the reason the charge deviated from its trajectory was an anomaly that had been discovered a few days earlier by Professor Shelby’s team. At the time of the events surrounding E1, the existence of this anomaly was already known to the Space Fleet High Command. Unfortunately, the facts known about it at that time and the brief time interval had not been enough to work out an effective strategy for counteracting it. The situation was complicated by the fact that the greater the energy of the anti-matter charge, the more the anomaly distorted the trajectory of the space weapon. Not having come across such a phenomenon before, the aiming computer was unable to recognise the distorting factors. The only solution programmed into it was to use excess strike energy.

  Using enough force to produce a huge crater in the surface of Europa, E1 was finally destroyed. But by turning the disobedient weapon into fine dust, the second echelon had buried forever the last hope of fully explaining the reasons for the control failure. The Space Fleet High Command had no option but to be content with theories.

  The first of these assumed a technical failure of E1’s built-in computer. Obviously, any such failure would have to have affected not only the targeting module but also the communications module, which had made it impossible to establish contact with the command ship. The gun crew might have been trying to restore control, and for that reason did not react to the warning shots, knowing that restoring control was the only thing that could save them from being destroyed. There was simply not enough time to contact the command ship by any other means.

  Another theory assumed that E1 had been acted on from outside. Looked on as a false flag operation, loss of control over it followed by a strike at the alien ship made sense, but raised a series of problems of a technical nature.

  To break through the defences of E1’s computer would require profound knowledge of its internal structure. Such information could be acquired by re-engineering after infiltrating the weapon system on site or while it was being transported to its place of deployment.

  Since mankind had long since mastered the technology of manufacturing and using nano-robots, E1, like any other modern weapon, had the means to protect and counteract the penetration of nano-machines into it, protecting not only its internal electronics, but also living personnel.

  For successful and imperceptible penetration, the means of infiltration would have to be smaller than nano-objects, yet possess considerable computing power. The creation of such robots came up not against technical difficulties, but a theoretical threshold. Such unimaginably small devices could not possess such unimaginably great computing power. In this case, the re-engineering and subsequent control of the weapon would require an incredibly impressive computing apparatus.

  There also remained the possibility of infiltration at the production stage. This theory also had many weak points. For example, how would the incomer know precisely what weapon would be used in the blockade? It was logical to assume that it could not know this, and therefore would have needed to infiltrate numerous arms factories. If they had, it would mean that most of Earth’s military production capacity was compromised. Furthermore, if the alien civilisation had such means of infiltration at their disposal, what was stopping it from extending its influence to the military infrastructure? With such control over the human race, there was no sense in staging such an incident.

  After long discussions, the military investigators were divided into two groups: those who supported the theory of a chance failure, and those who were convinced there had been interference from outside. In spite of the difference in their assessments of past events, their view of the future was identical: the alien civilisation had come to stay. Consequently, we should expect subsequent visits.

  4

  After several days of a sedentary way of life, Steve really missed his bicycle. As some compensation for the lack of movement, he wandered around the ship, looking into every corner with interest.

  He spent most time in the engine room, where he bombarded the engineer with questions. The sight of the mighty thermonuclear reactor booming along at 90 per cent power won Steve’s admiration. He, like many other students of the exact and natural sciences, had always been fascinated by massive power plants.

  Standing with the engineer on the upper floor of the engine room and looking down, the reactor remotely resembled a seven-pointed star. Thousands of fine tubes were interwoven into an immensely complicated tangle, each one fulfilling its own unique function in the general cause of generating electricity. Cables twice as thick as an arm extended out from the reactor. Immersed in channels filled with liquid nitrogen and cooled to a temperature close to absolute zero, their superconductor cores carried vast amounts of electrical energy from the generator to the engines.

  The heart of the ship was the apotheosis of contemporary engineering thought. The reactor itself differed in principle from its predecessors, particularly from the first-generation ones. It had no heat engine, yet the reactor had an efficiency coefficient of almost one.

  Mankind first discovered electricity in the 17th century. During the industrial revolution, it learned how to generate electricity on an industrial scale to electrify cities and factories. But for several hundred years, power stations remained the same in principle, although they changed externally, and more and more sophisticated engineering decisions were incorporated into their design.

  They used a large boiler to heat water which was fed under pressure to turn a turbine, which in turn turned a dynamo-type machine and thus produced electricity. This principle, dating from the Middle Ages, endured through the era of atomic power generation based on the fission of heavy elements. Nuclear power stations of this period still had the same steam boilers and furnaces, albeit atomic ones. The price of such a number of stages in the electricity generation cycle was low productivity. The old power stations irretrievably lost two thirds of the energy of the fuel burned in them in heating the nearby lakes and rivers, when water from the cooling circuit was ejected into them.

  It was only towards the end of the 21st century that mankind finally mastered a technology that managed without heat engines. This simple step had taken about 500 years. Steve involuntarily recalled the words of the messenger from another planet: we judge the level of development of a civilisation by the type of energy it has assimilated. After all, it was true; all the achievements of a civilisation were based on energy. Take away mankind’s power generation capability and it would immediately find itself back in the Middle Ages.

  Having looked around the ship, Steve finally reached the bridge. After some hesitation, he knocked and opened the door. In general, there was an unwritten law on the ship that members of the team should only appear on the bridge in the course of their duties or by order of the captain. It was not the done thing to ‘pop in for a minute’, to call in for a chat with the ship’s commander. Steve only had limited space flight experience, but he still intuitively understood the rules of subordination within the crew of a space ship. Nevertheless, his curiosity got the better of him. He subconsciously justified his actions to himself by believing that he was not just a member of the crew, he was also a commander, if only of the scientific part of the expedition.

  “Good day, Captain Kimble,” said Steve as he entered the bridge. As usual, Kimble was sitting in his chair reading. Hearing the greeting, he raised one eyebrow slightly on seeing his uninvited guest. That was how it seemed to Steve anyway. Oh, to hell with it... Let Kimble think that he simply didn’t understand their customs.

  “Hello, Steve. What can I do for you?”

  The captain put down his tablet and indicated that Steve should sit in the empty first pilot’s seat. Kimble turned it away from the console so that it was facing him, and Steve obediently sat down.

  “I’m getting to know the ship; I’ve just been in the
engine room. I thought I’d call in on you,” said Steve to start the conversation, and glanced at the pilot’s console. “Oh, we’ve already passed Mars’ orbit... By the way, do you know that certain members of the ‘Dawn’ project are continuing to receive intelligence information?”

  Kimble’s face expressed mild surprise.

  “I thought the project had been wound up.”

  “To some extent it has been. The project has been put on hold, but the military have not forgotten about it. Therefore they are keeping Dean Shelby informed of the current course of events and are consulting with him, so as not to miss something if the aliens decide to pay us another visit.”

  Kimble heard Steve out and nodded.

  “If you ask me, I’m sure the aliens will be back.”

  “Really? What makes you think so?” asked Steve.

  “Well, think about it. The first contact did not succeed. That’s no reason not to communicate in the future.”

  Steve smiled, and pointed to the tablet Kimble had been holding when he entered the bridge. It was obvious that the captain had been reading an e-book. The author’s name was clearly visible at the top of the screen – Carl von Clausewitz.

  “For a von Clausewitz fan, you take a very optimistic view of things,” he remarked.

  For the first time, Kimble smiled broadly. Steve had hit on a theme that was clearly close to the captain’s heart.

  “Where did you get the idea that I’m a fan of his?”

  “You finished reading it when we were flying here in the shuttle, and now you’re only just past the beginning. People don’t usually re-read books they don’t like.”

  “Anyone who has been in a military academy has read it.”

  “A lot of people have read it, but probably not all of them re-read it.”

  “Steve, you said that you are receiving intelligence information. Is something in it worrying you?” said Kimble, returning to the previous subject.